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Reviewed by Dot Emm
The Characters
| Character |
Role |
| Benny Chan |
A messenger for the Temple of the Golden Horde, and the first victim |
| Betty Chan |
Benny's sister, she wants to know why he's dead |
| Lieutenant Harry Forbes |
of the San Francisco police, he says Benny's death was an accident |
| C. V. Soong |
A wealthy philanthropist and owner of the six scrolls of Batu Khan |
| Carleton Sedgewick |
Lawyer for the Temple of the Golden Horde |
| Angela Smith/Farley |
A troubled teen, she is the second victim |
| Captain Mort Wade |
of the San Francisco police, a friend of Chan's |
| Li Po |
The Khan, or ruler, of The Temple of the Golden Horde |
| Madame Li |
Li Po's wife, Snow Princess of the Golden Horde |
| Opening lines
A thin fog hung over the high iron gates of the isolated estate on Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco. The night was chill and silent, and for a long time nothing moved among the trees and dark, distant buildings behind the high fence. The only sound was the muffled churning of surf on rocks in the fog night.
Somewhere the faint chimes of a clock struck ten times through the mist, when a pick-up truck came out of the fog along the narrow dirt road and screeched to a halt outside the high iron gates. A small Chinese man jumped out. For a moment he stood there between the pick-up and the high gates as if not sure what to do next.
He wore baggy old corduroy pants, a denim shirt, a dark blue windbreaker, and worn, dirty sneakers. There was something vacant about his smooth Oriental face, almost the puzzled face of a child on the thin body of a man in his early thirties. He carried a brass-bound, dark-wood box about the size of a bowling ball bag but shaped like a small chest, and looked around apprehensively in the swirling mist.
Suddenly he seemed to hear something in the night, his head cocked like a nervous bird ready to fly. He blinked down at the small chest in his hands. Then he ran to a small side gate beside the high iron gates, unlocked the small gate with a key, went through and slammed it shut behind him.
Once more he stood and listened, smiling broadly as if all at once feeling happy, and began to walk up a curving gravel drive toward a large building some half a mile ahead inside the gate. He walked in quick, short steps - half-running with one leg almost dragging in a sideways movement like a hurrying crab.
The large building soon loomed up ahead in the foggy night. One of three buildings scattered some distance apart on the wooded grounds, it was nothing at all like the other two. Where they were ordinary, two-story yellow-stucco buildings in Spanish style, it was all dark wood and tile, with wooden pillars holding up an open porch that ran around all four sides, and a high red-lacquered roof like a curved pyramid with the corners turned up - a Chinese pagoda in the mist of the California shore.
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Benny Chan, the mentally retarded handyman and messenger boy for The Temple of the Golden Horde, carries a box containing one of the priceless scrolls of Batu Khan from Hawaii all the way to the temple at Half Moon Bay. But before he can deliver the box to the khan of the temple, he is killed. His body is found three days later, drowned, and the police assume he walked to close to a cliff and fell in. His sister Betty knows better, however, since Benny Chan was desperately afraid of water. Betty goes to Charlie Chan for help.
Charlie Chan is in San Francisco, participating in an International Penology Symposium, but he takes time out to help Betty Chan. He visits the police to learn more about the death of Benny Chan, and while there C. V. Soong, wealthy philanthropist, arrives, wanting to know what has happened to the priceless scroll that the dead Chan was carrying. Liuetenant Forbes produces the box that Chan was carrying, and the scroll is inside it.
If Benny Chan was murdered, why was he murdered? Why was not the priceless scroll taken? What secrets lie in the Temple of the Golden Horde, where people send their difficult children for 'retreats?'
In 1974, Dennis Lynds wrote a full length novelization of an unproduced screenplay, entitled Charlie Chan Returns. One of the flaws of that work is that there isn't a single sympathetic character to be found, and one doesn't really care if the murderer is found or not.
When Lynds wrote a novella for the Charlie Chan Mystery Magazine (under their house pseudonym) he did not make the same mistake. Although we meet Benny Chan only briefly, he clearly doesn't deserve to die and we want to see his killers captured. His sister Betty comes to Charlie Chan to ask for help, and since she's a sympathetic character, we want him to help her. So far so good.
There's some interesting history in the story as well, as C. V. Soong explains the significance of the scrolls of Batu Khan.
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Lt. Forbes said, "I guess I'm ignorant, but what is The Golden Horde, and who was Batu Khan?"
"Who was -?" C.V. Soong slowly shook his head. "My apologies, Lieutenant, I forget that the young of America have so little interest in history or the Orient."
The older man paused, sighed, "I'm sure you know that in the early 16th Century, the great Ghengis Khan led his Mongol horsemen out of the wastelands north of China to conquer most of the world of Asia, the Middle East, and eastern Europe. His method was not to use one army, but many armies under strong generals all at the same time, so that in the end his armies before and after his death became led by his sons and grandsons, and became dominant in different areas."
"One grandson, the great Kublai Khan, became emperor of China, founder of the Yuan dynasty," Chan explained.
"The oldest grandson was Batu, and he led the invasions of Europe," C.V. Soong went on. "He conquered almost all of European Russia between 1235 and 1240, and probably could have taken all of Europe - he reached the Adriatic Sea and central Germany, defeated the Hungarians. But in 1241 Ghengis's successor as great Khan, Batu's uncle Ogadai, died, and Batu withdrew to Russia to be nearer the Mongol capital at Karakorum."
Chan said, "There is no doubt that European history was changed by Batu's withdrawal in 1241, as Russian history was made by his settling with his armies in Russia."
"He founded the Khanate of Kipchak, better known by its Russian name of The Golden Horde," C.V. Soong said. "The Khanate Of The Golden Horde ruled most of Russia for two hundred years until broken up by Tamerlane, and even then the Crimean Khanate went on to almost 1800! A power that changed the world left as a record only six scrolls from its early days - three from Batu's own time, and three from his successor Berke Khan's time."
"And you own all six scrolls?" Forbes said.
Soong nodded, "Think of it - the only records of events that changed the destiny of Asia and Europe! I have written a book on them, lent them to museums, and had scholars from both Russia and China come to study them. Recently, I agreed to give them on a year's loan to The Temple Of The Golden Horde here."
"What is this Temple Of The Golden Horde?" Chan asked.
"The only temple in America of a small cult that has existed since Batu Khan's day, believers in Mongol Shamanism," Soong said. "They have copies of the scrolls, of course, but a few months ago they asked me to lend them the originals for a year of study, and I agreed. Great documents should be used, not kept in some vault. Because I had been working with them, and to lessen the danger of loss or damage, I sent them one at a time over a period of a few months. All arrived safely, until now."
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So far, still good. Unfortunately, after this, the story fails to live up to its promise, as Charlie Chan meets a hysterical young woman at the Temple of the Golden Horde, who somehow manages to escape from locked rooms (how she manages this is never explained) and is eventually found hanged. Chan goes to Hawaii to take the sixth and final scroll from Hawaii to San Francisco himself. Yet he is attacked and the scroll stolen. Although the Khan of the Temple is killed and left in Chan's hotel room, Chan himself is Not killed (big mistake on the part of the murderer) and the box with its precious scroll is not stolen.
The denoument doesn't make sense. Mentally retarded Benny Chan is supposed to have somehow opened the secret compartment of the box, and found what it contained, and so he is killed. Angela Smith, the second victim, is supposed to not only have seen the people who killed him, but also seen him open the box and know its secret. How could she have done this when Benny Chan does not open the box on temple grounds?
So, it's a flawed story, of interest because it is a Chan story, and it might stimulate the desire to know Oriental history in the breast of readers today. Libraries should definately buy it, so their patrons can read it and return it once done.
Author Dennis Lynds (this novella is reprinted under the pseudonym Michael Collins) is not one to waste a plot. In the 1970s, under the pen name William Arden, he wrote a few books for the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series. One of these was The Mystery of the Dancing Devil, which also features a history of the Golden Horde, and a Mongol Shaman, too!
Read A Proverb For Every Occasion
Visit Charlie Chan's Hawaii
This review uploaded January 25, 2003.
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